Her Majesty’s Record of Needlework, Knitting and Royal Proclamations

Mary Burgess

Hello! Thanks for stopping by my revived blog! It’s so encouraging to see comments from old friends!

I had every intention of working on Abigail Brown by Examplarery and ran out and bought new scroll rods and some new Velcro tape (what do you think of Velcro tape, by the way?) and got it all set up and going but I stopped fairly quickly. I was not enjoying the weave of the linen or dmc threads. This is my first foray back into sampler stitching in years and it wasn’t cutting it. I wanted the feel of dense, smooth linen under my hands and smooth silk sliding through my fingers. Last night, while putting something away, I found the cover of Mary Burgess.

Isn’t she beautiful? I remember how badly I wanted this kit from Essamplaire and I’m pretty sure my friend, Lisa, bought her for me as a gift and maybe even one for herself? Lisa – is that right? At Sampler Gathering?

I have no idea why only the cover page was stuck in a drawer, but I immediately set out trying to find the parts. I found the linen rolled up in a basket, already attached to scroll rods, I had gotten in the blue row at the top, as well as the first line of salmon montenegrin:

After a few hours spent digging through four large totes of my stitching stash, I found the charts and threads!!! They weren’t even in the same tote! So I got it all set up in my stand:

This finally all happened at almost midnight and I sat down and wanted to just thread a needle and get in one length of silk before bed. Aren’t these silks lovely?

Yeah, too bad they don’t go with this project. I was staring at them wondering what was wrong, when I realized there was black silk here, yet there isn’t any in the project and after looking at the list, I realized they don’t belong to Mary at all. So I spent some more time digging and came up with these!

Equally lovely and just as equally not belonging to Mary Burgess. Sigh. SOMEWHERE there is a bag of silks that belongs to my Mary, but I have no idea where. I’m going to poach what I can out of these two and then order whatever else I don’t have. This sampler is being stitched, no matter what! And I’ve decided to buy much smaller totes and organize my stash. I’ve sold off a lot of it over the past 6 years, but even if I stitched every day for the rest of my life, I don’t think I could finish what is in my stash. And after pouring over it last night for several hours, I wonder how on earth I could have shoved it all away in a closet and not picked up needle and thread for so long! It’s like falling in love all over again.

I was so excited to get a blog comment from you, because I used to read your blog religiously & was always excited to see when you had an update. I’m so glad you’re blogging again and stitching again! Woohoo!